OpenOffice.org Tips and Tricks Part III

Inserting Fontwork (WordArt)

August 25, 2008

If you've read through Part
I and Part
II of this tutorial series, you ought to have plenty of templates and clip
art for OpenOffice.org (OOo), be typing
grammatically-correct papers, and know a few more tips and tricks to ease your
transition from Microsoft (MS) Office. Now this part will help you perform a few
tasks in OOo that were available in MS Office, just harder to figure out due to
the different interface. You'll find out you can still insert WordArt (actually
called Fontwork), diagrams, and page numbering in OOo documents.

Are you a WordArt fanatic? Can't find an equivalent text effect creator in
OOo? Well, you don't have to fret any longer, OOo's Fontwork feature is here to
save your day. As Figure 1 shows, Fontwork creates text similar to WordArt.

Fontwork has its own toolbar, which usually isn't visible by default. So to
access the Fontwork settings from OOo, click View -- Toolbars -- Fontwork. Then
to add Fontwork to your document, click the Fontwork icon (the picture frame
with the letter A) to open the Fontwork Galley. Select the style you want to use
and click OK. Once it's added to the document you can edit the text by
double-clicking the Fontwork object, which in many cases displays the text in a
editable format that is hard to see.

Once you have the Fontwork added, you can try out the different styles if you
wish. Simply select the Fontwork object and click the Fontwork Shape icon. You
can also fiddle with the letter height, character spacing, and alignment
settings from the Fontwork toolbar as well. You can customize the colors,
sizing, borders, and more by right clicking the Fontwork object and selecting
Line, Area, or Position and Size, depending on what you want to do. You should
be able to get the text to match your desired color and style scheme.